All About Nokia Belle - 2. Apps & Widgets

Apps
We don't have to hide the fact that for iOS and Android you have tons of choices in applications, games et cetera. Even the Marketplace for Windows Phone has developed at incredible speed. On the other hand, the Nokia shop for apps on Nokia Belle should not be underestimated either. Nokia already offers a 100.000 apps in total for its several platforms (S40, S60, S60, Symbian Anna, Belle, and N9).

Using Nokia Belle Feature Pack 1 you'll find the apps in ten different categories, where of course Nokia Maps (and Nokia Drive) are king: totally free navigation worldwide! Also there are a lot of city guides if you’re into travelling. You can find several apps on music, social media, photo and video, news and information, sports, all conveniently sorted in “featured”, “free” and “new”.

Apps can be free, for some you have to pay somewhere between €1 and €9. Adding an App or a widget is quite simple by the way: in the app menu you press the app longer to connect it to the home screen where you want it, you can move it around or delete it by holding it a bit longer until a cross appears.

Facebook and Twitter are integrated in the platform, so you don’t have to worry about that, although there are many other clients you can choose as well.

Some “social apps” are free (FourSquare for Symbian for instance), others will cost you some money, or some more even, like Gravity. This Twitter client has a good reputation but will cost you €9. Another practical app is the free “FlickrUp” with which you can directly upload your pictures to your own Flickr account. And yes: “WhatsApp” is there too (a relief to many, no doubt!).

If you like to make screenshots yourself, you can just look for what is being offered: I chose the free “Tap2Screen” and it works quite well (although it leaves the camera button in the screenshot). And of course there are tons of themes to be found in the marketplace if you like to personalize your phone – which you can at least partially do with your own pictures as well (works for us).

On Nokia Belle, you can connect to your social networks via a dedicated pre-installed app. Here you can connect to your Twitter and your Facebook account – there are no other networks included.

Everything that is being shared with you either on Twitter or Facebook,will be shown in that application, and if you want to see the most recent message, you can place a widget on one of the homescreens. Which brings us to the widgets!

Widgets
There are quite a lot of widgets available, you see just a few in this screenshot. Which one you will like and use the most is up to you. We´ll only mention a few of the widgets we like and use.

Bluetooth on/off is of course easy in the car, so that’s likely to be on your front page. Just like the Calendar, or the Wi-Fi switcher to save battery. There’s even a switcher for NFC. Four different clocks form an alternative to the small time display in the upper right hand corner.

There a some apps we truly love, we really think you can’t do without. The Maps app will directly put 4 shortcuts in your screen for Nokia Maps, Drive, Weather and City Maps.

Another great widget is the Mobile data tracker, so you can see how much data you have used. Important if you don’t have a flat fee contract, and even more important when you are abroad.

When abroad, the widget to switch mobile data on/off of course is practical as well. We could go on for quite a while on widgets – we won’t. Suffice to say there’s a lot of them and you will probably want to use a them a lot.

Microsoft Apps
For Symbian/Nokia Belle fans, something very good came out of the collaboration with Microsoft as well. Nokia Belle Feature Pack 1 offers “Microsoft Apps”, as announced a few weeks ago on
Nokia Conversations:

“In February this year, we announced that OneNote, Lync 2010, Document Connection and PowerPoint Broadcast were available for Symbian. Now, Word Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile and Excel Mobile are the latest applications to join the suite of Microsoft Apps built especially for the latest Symbian smartphones (…) The Nokia 808 PureView will also come with all these apps when it begins selling.”

We don’t think we have to explain how extremely practical it is to be able to read and edit Word documents for instance, or use OneNote on your mobile. I tested them shortly on Nokia’s E7 smartphone, because it has the same 4 inch screen size as the 808 PureView. And the complete set of Microsoft applications will be pre-installed on the 808 PureView as well.